Component Based Flow Design Debug - 2024.2 English - UG1702

Vitis Reference Guide (UG1702)
Document ID
UG1702
Release Date
2025-01-15
Version
2024.2 English
The following steps illustrate component based flow design debug for hardware emulation.
  1. Start the QEMU emulation environment by selecting the Start Emulator command from the Flow Navigator.

  2. This opens the following dialog box.

    Where:

    • Show Waveform: Enables the display of the Live simulation Waveform view from within the Vivado Logic Simulator during the Emulation run. This lets you examine waveforms in real-time. However, it takes more time and resources to run.
    • Enable Trace: Enables capturing trace data from hardware emulation.
    • Additional Arguments: Used to pass additional arguments to the launch_emulator utility from the command line when starting QEMU. For example, this can be used for specifying options to pass to the AI Engine simulator that runs the graph application, as described in the Reusing AI Engine Simulator Options in AI Engine Tools and Flows User Guide (UG1076).
    The options can be specified as follows:

    -aie-sim-options ../aiesim_options.txt

    • Enable Profile: Enables profiling of the design as explained in Profiling the Application in the Data Center Acceleration using Vitis (UG1700).
    • Key/Value Pairs: Specifies parameters to use when running the application in the form of the parameter name and value.
  3. Click Start to launch the emulator. Then you must wait for the QEMU environment to boot the emulation system before starting your application.

    The TASK: EMULATION output terminal shows a transcript of the QEMU launch and boot process. You will know the process has completed when the /mnt# command prompt is displayed on the terminal window. From the command prompt, you can type commands in the QEMU environment, and review the transcript of the boot process for details.
    Important: Do not run the emulation from this window. The Vitis Unified IDE will manage the application when launched from the Run or Debug command in the Flow Navigator after the emulator has been started.
  4. After the QEMU has started, click Debug from the Flow Navigator. This opens the Debug view in the Vitis Unified IDE and connects to the PS application and AI Engine graph running on their respective cores in the QEMU. The application automatically breaks at the main() function for all the ELF files.

  5. Click Continue ▶ from the Control Panel to start the process.

From this point, you can perform debug activities such as step in, step over, viewing variables and plant break points in the emulation environment. Refer to Using the Debug Environment for more information.